MEMS 411: Group V Ball Bearing Sorter

After a semester of hard work, Team V is proud to unveil its finished prototype for the 2024-2025 ASME Student Design Competition. The theme of this challenge was "Assembly Line Sorting and Packaging." The goal of this challenge was to make a device able to satisfy the criteria of sorting between six different bearings of different sizing and material properties, and meeting spatial and time limitations. This device needed to be fast, accurate, compact, and able to sort in bulk. Team V feels like we have met most of these requirements with our final design prototype. For this project, a completely mechanical approach was used for our group's design. This approach was taken with our team's lack of experience in coding or electronics in mind. The decision was made to rely solely on Newtonian physics and material properties such as density and magnetism. This approach had its upsides and downside. Our group found that an important downside of a purely mechanical design was controllability and random motion. A purely mechanical system relies on tight tolerances to minimize randomness in the design, but a group that utilizes electronic components can better minimize this randomness with solenoids and actuators regulating the flow of bearings. Our group has reflects that we could have better minimized the randomness of ball collisions with each other and imperfect geometry by utilizing 3D-printed components. Despite our current limitations, our project was able to accurately sort single bearings and quickly sort many bearing at a time without jamming (at the cost of accuracy).